Avoid flaccid lettuce, gently-rotting cucumber and shiny processed ham with Tom Parker Bowles's guide to the perfect salad

North Oxford in the early 1980s, sometime around noon. It’s a typically dreary Lenten day and, as dozens of ravenous prep-school boys clatter into the dining hall, battered aluminium trays are unceremoniously dumped upon scruffily scuffed tables. One glance at their contents and the happy hubbub suddenly ceases. Salad.

Oh, God, please not the salad. For this is no crisp, refreshing bite, well dressed as a Jermyn Street dandy, nor happy hors d’oeuvre, designed to pique the palate for the pleasures to come. Hell no. It’s an insidious study in sorrow, a masterpiece of barely edible melancholia, a poisonous paean to the limp and unlovely.

There’s the mass of flaccid lettuce, still soaked from its desultory wash, harbouring the occasional invertebrate beastie; a half-hearted grating of carrot, alongside a chunk of something that might officially be known as a tomato. Rock hard, this sorry fruit has all the flavour of distilled water. A few slices of cucumber, gently rotting, add their primal slime, alongside hard-boiled eggs that seem to have been on the simmer since Cain killed Abel.

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Worst of all — more deranged than the shiny flaps of processed ham, with a mean splodge of salad cream so acidic it strips the enamel from your teeth — is the beetroot, deep purple and sinister, which stains the whole sorry melange with barely contained contempt. Our hearts sink. Our spirits droop. Welcome, dear reader, to the Great British salad.

Back then, it was the same in cafés and institutions across the land, the Winter of Discontent in vegetal form, a hangover from rationing, 30 years on, something to endure, rather than to enjoy. This joyless medley was made all the more awful in comparison to the simple green salads of home. Butter lettuce, freshly dug from the garden, cleaned, dried in a plastic spinner, then tossed in a mustard-heavy vinaigrette.

For us, salad was a delight rather than dirge, no mere side dish, rather a star in its own right — but it is a dish that defies easy definition. From the blessed simplicity of tomatoes, sun warmed and fresh from the vine, eaten with a pinch of salt, to the modern Instagram excesses of the Baroquely bonkers, salad has something for everyone.

What unites them all, I suppose, is not so much the ingredients (although vegetables, pulses and herbs will generally play a role), rather some form of dressing involving oil and vinegar, which takes a bunch of disparate elements and gathers them into one harmonious whole. Had I the space, and you the patience, I could fill tomes on the subject.

Caesar salad, born in Tijuana and splendidly punchy; the abundant generosity of the Cobb (see recipe) and the robustly American, blue-cheese-drenched charms of an iceberg wedge. Panzanella, all sweetly sharp, juice-soaked bread; the lactic cool of a proper Greek salad and the eternal allure of caprese. There’s that salad in Brideshead Revisited, of ‘watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives’, and the niçoise, of course, seasoned with sun. There’s even salad as ritual and remembrance, maror, the bitter herbs eaten at Passover Seder to symbolise the bitterness of slavery.

Move east, to tabbouleh, that Middle Eastern masterpiece, and Thai som tum, as fiery as it is bracing, eaten on the streets of Bangkok; Laotian larb mixes finely chopped meat with a tangle of herbs and warm chilli burr. Smashed cucumber from China’s Sichuan province combines the numbing (ma) with the spicy (la), whereas Indonesian gaddo-gaddo and karedok provide a riot of tastes and textures, as do Malaysian kerabu timun and Mexican ensalada de nopalitos.

Every culture has its own take, each individual their own taste. As to its construction? It takes four people, according to the old Roman saying, to create the perfect salad — a miser to put in the vinegar, a spendthrift to add the oil, a wise man to season and a mad man to toss it all together. At their most basic, Roman salads, known as ‘salata’ or ‘salted things’, were little more than raw vegetables or herbs, sprinkled with a little salt, vinegar and oil.

Recipes from the likes of Columella and Apicius were altogether more complex affairs, featuring everything from almonds and fresh cheese to figs, octopus, olives, dates and bread. Dressings often used garum (Roman fish sauce) with liberal aplomb. These salads were as much medicinal as gastronomic, gentle digestive aids to prepare the stomach for the oncoming onslaught.

Greek physician Galen not only believed that raw vegetables were essential in balancing the four Humours (blood, phlegm and biles black and yellow), but managed to cure his insomnia, too. The Romans may have introduced the concept to our shores, but it was here, from medieval times, where the dish flourished. The Forme of Cury, a 14th-century proto-cookbook, defined ‘salat’ as a variety of herbs, flowers, chives, green garlic and onion, wearing a dressing made from oil, vinegar and salt. A few years later, slices of orange and lemon were added for decoration.

Then came Robert May, in 1660, with The Accomplisht Cook. In it, 14 recipes for the ‘grand sallet’, which were, like salmagundis a century or so later, epic feasts for eyes as well as belly. Cold capons, salt beef, pickled oysters, potatoes, olives and samphire were all thrown in with reckless abandon. These were the stars of the Golden Age, upwardly mobile salads, food as a show of one’s wealth.

It was with the publication of John Evelyn’s 1699 classic, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, that the art of the salad reached its peak. For here was an entire book dedicated to the subject. ‘We are by sallet to understand,’ wrote the great herbalist, ‘a particular Composition of certain Crude and fresh Herbs, such as usually are, or may be safely eaten with some Acetous juice, Oyl, Salt, &c. to give them a grateful Gust and Vehicle.’

He lists 82 different vegetables and herbs, together with notes on their growing seasons and a nine-step guide to their dressing. Another salad obsessive was the French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas. ‘There is almost always some on hand, and it generally tastes good,’ says the sage of the salad bowl, before going into intricate detail as to exactly when to eat what.

Chicory in autumn, seasoned with nothing more than a stale crust of bread rubbed with garlic and placed in the bottom of the bowl. At Easter, lettuce dressed with herbs, marinated oysters, shrimp, turtle’s eggs, Indian pickles and Chinese soya sauce. Salad, for Dumas, was no mere whimsy, rather a concoction worthy of serious study. However, the less said about Russian salad, a modern mountebank, the better.

I once had a deconstructed version in a grand Milanese place where the pea-studded mess (which resembles cat sick) was topped with a dome of spun sugar. It still haunts me to this day. Waldorf salad holds little appeal, a turgid mess of grape and apple — I share Basil Fawlty’s pain. As for those American ‘Jello’ aberrations… get thee away, Satan.

But enough of the base and deranged. Great salad is not only about balance, of taste and texture, oil and acidity, but about feeding a very personal yen. ‘There are few dishes which are used so widely in all classes of society as this one,’ says Dumas — nor any quite as universally adored. Salads were once in a sorrowful state in Britain, but they can be a thrilling riot of tastes and textures.

Cobb salad

The Cobb is an American classic, created in 1936 at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood, California, either by, or in honour of, owner Robert Cobb. This should be big and unashamedly bounteous, with gently poached chicken, and a dressing that is sharp and coats every part. If you’re not a fan of blue cheese, replace with a similar amount of Comté, cut into smallish cubes. The greens are traditionally mixed, then the rest of the ingredients laid out in colourful lines or blocks on top.

Ingredients

Serves 6

2 skinless chicken breasts

6 black peppercorns

1 bay leaf

1 celery stalk, split

½ onion

6 strips of smoked streaky bacon

Bunch of watercress, thick stems removed

1 head of chicory, separated

1 large head of Romaine lettuce, separated

4 hard-boiled eggs, finely chopped

1 avocado, chopped into small cubes

4 tomatoes, finely chopped

100g/3½oz Roquefort or other well-behaved blue cheese, diced or crumbled

For the dressing

3 tbspn white-wine vinegar

Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Big pinch of mustard powder

½ tsp caster sugar

Jig of Worcestershire sauce

150ml/5fl oz extra virgin olive oil

Method

• Put the chicken breasts in a pan with the peppercorns, bay leaf, celery stalks and onion and add water to cover. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a mere ‘blip, blip’, cover and poach for 15 minutes, until the chicken is piping hot and cooked through, with no sign of pink in the juices when the thickest part is pierced with a skewer. Transfer the chicken to a plate and leave to cool

• Fry the bacon until crisp, then roughly chop and set aside.

• Cut the chicken meat into 2½cm/1in cubes and put in a large bowl. Add the bacon, watercress, chicory, romaine lettuce, eggs, avocado, tomatoes and cheese, and toss

• Make the dressing by whisking together the vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard powder, sugar and Worcestershire sauce. When combined, whisk in the oil. Taste for seasoning, then dribble over the salad so every leaf is gleaming with it, but not drenched

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.